6 APRIL 1844, Page 8

POSTSCRIPT.

SATURDAY NIGHT.

All the journals today are deficient in political news ; the great Times itself being filled up with long extracts from several Parliamen- tary papers and such documents. The Leading Journal, however, does not altogether neglect passing polities, but professes to have detected Lord Campbell in a trick: his bill to facilitate criminal appeals, accord- ing to the Times, was originally retrospective, and is still meant for a stroke of moral force- " Lord Campbell, with that innocence which every body knows to be his leading characteristic, had suggested his new law-reform as a mere matter of abstract propriety—the removal of an obsolete anomaly—the brushing away of a cobweb, to which nobody could object. The Chancellor, however, more awake to the wicked ways of politicians, did not fail to smell the rat ; and, whether or not be approved of the principle of the bill, protested decidedly against this temporary use of it in favour of Mr. O'Connell. The bill was accordingly revised—its operation deferred to theist of August next ; and thus, a contemporary observes, ' containing no retrospective reference which might excite party passions, it cannot fail to recommend itself to the good sense and feeling of the community. " We have before now observed that Lord Campbell is an ingenious, though not uniformly a fortunate tactician. On this occasion his little arrangedients were not bad in their way. Finding it impossible to carry a Parliamentary enactment that Mr. O'Connell should not be put in limbo, he has contented himself with attempting quietly to slip through the House of Lords a recogni- tion of the principle that he ought not to be put there." [The Times goes on to show, that some marplot of the Opposition press has actually been turning the barely-introduced bill to account in this way, by building upon it a slashing hypothetical tirade against the Ministry.]